Heinkel He 162 Salamander
A single-seat jet fighter built by Heinkel Flugzeugwerke under the Volksjäger ("People's Fighter") emergency programme, the He 162 went from contract to first flight in 74 days in late 1944. Built largely of wood to save strategic materials, it reached one Luftwaffe fighter wing in token numbers in 1945, was never certified ready for combat, and had no effect on the outcome of the war.
Why It Mattered
The He 162 was the aircraft built for the Volksjäger, or People's Fighter, programme, the Reich Air Ministry's emergency attempt in the autumn of 1944 to mass-produce a cheap jet fighter as Germany's military position collapsed. The specification issued on 10 September 1944 demanded an "emergency, lightweight fighter" that would outperform piston-engined fighters while using the least possible steel and aluminium. It also required the jet to be so simple that teenage Hitler Youth pilots could fly it into combat after rudimentary training. That premise proved illusory, and the type arrived in too few numbers to affect the war, but no other aircraft better shows how far desperation could compress the work of designing and building a fighter.
Design Notes
Heinkel received the contract on 23 September 1944 and flew the first prototype on 6 December, just 74 days later. A single BMW 003 turbojet, mounted on top of the small fuselage, provided the power. To conserve strategic materials the airframe was made primarily of wood, since metals were in very short supply and reserved for other aircraft. The first armament fit, two 30 mm MK 108 cannon, proved too heavy for the small airframe, so Heinkel substituted two 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon, producing the He 162 A-2. Because the engine sat directly behind the cockpit, a conventional bail-out was dangerous, and the type was fitted with an ejection seat, reported to be the first on a single-engine aircraft. Haste left its mark on the handling: the jet remained a difficult, even dangerous, aircraft to fly, even for experienced pilots.
Operational History
Flight testing began with the first flight on 6 December 1944, and four days later the prototype broke up in the air and crashed, killing test pilot Gotthold Peter. The failure was traced to defective bonding in the wooden structure. Production nevertheless started before the initial testing and modification phase was complete. Of some 1,000 aircraft on the assembly lines, fewer than 150 were completed and delivered to German airfields, and most of the completed aircraft never flew, lacking parts, fuel and pilots. As in much of German industry at the time, the programme used a large number of slave labourers. Re-equipment of JG 1, the type's only operational wing, began in February 1945, and on 31 March two of its Gruppen moved to Leck airbase, near the Danish border, to begin operational training. The aircraft was never certified ready for combat, and its pilots had only very limited encounters with Allied aircraft; a small number of victories were claimed in mid-April 1945. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, the type had achieved nothing of military significance.
Afterlife
Captured examples were shipped to the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union for further evaluation. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds Werknummer 120230, one of the JG 1 aircraft captured by the British at Leck on 8 May 1945; transferred by the U.S. Air Force in 1949, it is not currently on display. The RAF Museum in London displays another aircraft from Leck, an A-2 captured by the RAF Regiment there on 6 May 1945. The name by which the type is best known needs a caution: "Salamander" was the codename of the wing-construction programme, not of the aircraft, which Heinkel itself called Spatz, or "Sparrow".